Tag: Flash Fiction

My breakfast bagel and I squeeze from the elevator past a guy on a gurney when the fluorescent lights flicker and go dark. Wondering when the emergency generator will kick in, I consult my watch. It’s now 0817. Code Green Time.

Part way down the corridor, Mrs. Sewall from 511 hails me to empty her bedpan, complaining her TV is on the fritz as I rearrange her emaciated limbs. At the nurses’ station, Rachel informs a knot of powder-blue caregivers that her PC and phone are down, so check your mobiles. My screen swims with abstract expressionist art and, in fact, all our devices are dysfunctional in some special way. Harry the oncology resident, woozily roused from his power nap, holds up his old flip phone. Still works, he reports, but no bars.

Alicia has fetched a clock radio from a patient’s room that miraculously had a working backup battery. We stand by as she twirls the dial for sounds of intelligent life. There is but one, some guy saying “… Repeat: The blackout covers a broad swath across the Eastern half of the country. We have no indication of foul play or enemy attack. Technicians are working to restore services as quickly as possible. Stay tuned to this station for updates.”

Our Chief Resident barks marching orders. I am to round up portable respirators and haul them to the ICU. On my way I stop by the solarium, half full of patients variously staring at magazines, blank screens or air molecules. From my elevated vantage, the cityscape looks normal but for odd knots of pedestrians on State Street. Across the way, people queued up at Krogers aren’t being let in. Street traffic is at a standstill. Drivers are loitering by their vehicles. What could have halted them all in their tracks?

Then comes a motorist slaloming a 60s-vintage Ford pickup around disabled cars, stopping to let people clamber on, third-world style. How come that clunker still works? Aha! methinks. No Intel inside to conk out. What brought on this standstill was likely a solar flare, a ginormous magnetic pulse that clobbered cars, phones, computers and power plants. Perhaps even airplanes. Oh the humanity!

What will we do without electrons? At least we still have books. If we’re not constantly fighting and foraging we’ll have time to read them. Klaatu barada nikto, I mumble as I trudge back to work.

This story also is posted on The Story Hall, a publication at medium.com.

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The Daily (or whenever) Eruption

DIY Sex Ed: Wednesday 5/22/19

As a callow, overweight youth just having graduated from Tween University with a degree in Acne, I felt certain stirrings and had heard certain rumors about “doing it.” One day I repeated a crude joke from the playground to my mom and followed up with:

“What’s a cunt?”

“Well,” she said, drawing a breath and letting it out, “it’s part of the female anatomy and I’ll leave it at that. I think you and your father should have a little talk about the birds and the bees.”

Assuming she had prepped Dad to have “the talk,” I waited for it to happen, face flushing whenever we menfolk were by ourselves, but he never did tell me anything about reproductive rites. But it wasn’t long before a little book that I didn’t think had been in our library mysteriously appeared on my bedspread, called Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers by a nice lady whose name I forget.

So I did what any 13-year-old would do: I immediately hid the book, lest a friend come by and notice it, and furtively read it in bed by flashlight, looking for the good parts. There was, alas, no mention of birds or bees. It occurred to me that I had never witnessed birds doing it, and certainly not bees, but perhaps those two houseflies I remembered seeing united in flight were making whoopee. It must be a thing, I figured, recalling listening to Noel Coward croon “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it” from our phonograph, but really, how do birds do it? Do they take off their feathers first? Do Bees lay aside their little stingers?